Village to welcome Active Motif (update)

November 26, 2012

SARANAC LAKE - Village officials will welcome the biotech company Active Motif to the community with a reception and ribbon-cutting event next week.

Set for 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 5, the ceremony will take place in the former village water department building at 17 Main St., where Active Motif relocated last month from Lake Placid. The village spent close to half a million dollars renovating the building for the company, which is leasing 2,400 square feet of office space inside for roughly $29,000 a year.

Active Motif's move to Saranac Lake follows that of Myriad-RBM, which moved its Lake Placid location to the former village offices at 3 Main St. last June. The village spent more than $700,000 renovating the building for Active Motif. The company is paying about $70,000 a year to rent the space.

Village officials say the two businesses have helped make Saranac Lake into a biotech cluster, building on the existing Trudeau Institute, a nonprofit biomedical research center just outside the village, and Bionique Testing Laboratories, a for-profit contract testing company located in the town of Harrietstown's Adirondack Regional Business Park in Lake Clear.

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"This emerging industry offers good-paying, sustainable jobs to our Adirondack region as well as a large and positive presence in our downtown," village Mayor Clyde Rabideau said in a news release.

The village's effort to develop a biotech cluster won it a Local Government Achievement Award for Economic Development earlier this year from the New York Conference of Mayors.

"We're now poised to go after other biotechs and bring them into our Saranac Lake community in the years to come," Rabideau said.

The public is invited and encouraged to attend the Dec. 5 welcome ceremony for Active Motif by making reservations with the village Community Development office at 518-891-4150. There is no charge to attend. The cost for the reception is entirely underwritten by three companies involved with renovations to the building: the architectural and engineering firm Bernier, Carr and Associates; Integrated Rigging and Contracting, which was the project's general contractor; and Murray Electric, the project's electrical contractor.